


Epic Misunderstanding

by rivkat



Category: Smallville
Genre: Eight crazy nights, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 07:28:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For jackycomelately: something on the aftermath of Doomsday killing Clark; Lex having to step in and help the Justice League when Wonder Woman asks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [史诗乌龙](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4729361) by [lisabart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisabart/pseuds/lisabart)



Part I

“I grieve with you,” Wonder Woman said, alighting on the part of the patio that Clark had been accustomed to use.

There were at least three ways in which she’d done enough to trigger a killing rage. But for some reason he couldn’t find the energy for it, not to mention that the Amazon was the only one of them he wasn’t sure he could defeat even in his own tower.

“We were mortal enemies,” he said instead, pinching the bridge of his nose and then smoothing his hand over the back of his head, because in times of great trial sometimes self-comfort was more important than using an obvious tell.

“I was present at the funeral,” Wonder Woman said, and Lex flashed back to it—Lois punching like a hockey player and then sobbing in his arms. The bruises took hours to fade and her makeup had ruined his suit, not that he would have worn it again in any event. Lois had been so warm in his arms, almost fragile in her unaltered humanity, nothing like a metahuman.

But Wonder Woman was talking again. “I was also—aware—of your relationship.”

Lex waited for elaboration, but none was forthcoming. The relationship where they held deep grudges for harms inflicted decades past in a small town now largely wiped off the face of the map? That just didn’t seem to fit her tone. Possibly she meant that she knew that Lex knew who Clark really was, and thus Clark had known that Lex knew—but he was too tired for all the layers of subterfuge; he was very, very tired indeed.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, reaching for his abandoned drink, “but what exactly is the purpose of this visit?”

“Given your knowledge of the League, and your resources, I have come on behalf of the League, in the name of the love we all bore Kal-El, to ask your aid as we recover from his loss,” she said.

Lex didn’t choke on his drink, but it was a near thing.

When he could look at her again, she wasn’t smiling, but there was a hint of something rueful in the tilt of her lips. “Did you think you kept it a secret with your public shows of conflict? Kal-El never spoke a word, but there are things for which no words need be spoken.”

Wait, Wonder Woman thought—apparently the _entire governing cadre of the Justice League thought_ \--that Lex had been carrying on some sort of clandestine affair with Superman? That his carefully conceived (though admittedly often poorly executed) plans were the equivalent of the schoolboy pulling the pigtails of his prepubescent crush?

Lex didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

“I will not beg,” she said carefully. “You know as well as I the enemies who will seek to take advantage of his passing.”

She just had to play the endangered Earth card, didn’t she? Now _Lex_ was the asshole.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked warily.

Which was how LexCorp ended up operationally integrated with the Justice League, and how Lex ended up hearing a rather astonishing variety of Superman stories from the other side of the aisle, so to speak. Apparently every goddamned person on the planet, and not a few offworld, had been convinced of their forbidden passion, and after a while Lex found it more expedient to smile sadly than to deny.

He was a widower without ever having gotten to be a husband. It was the worst possible thing Clark could have found to do to him, abandoning him to this _pity_ , and Lex hated him even more in death than in life. Even Martha Kent’s tentative reconciliation did little to soothe the wound. (Though Lex had to admit that beating back Darkseid in concert with the League had its satisfactions.)

The extra cherry (ha!) on top was that Diana and the others tended to look at his casual fucks like he was using them as a form of self-medication, which was so very much not a turn-on that he largely gave up on recreational sex, League business being highly likely to interrupt any evening he’d scheduled some time for himself. Heaven forfend that he try to date someone serious, like that professor of archaeology at Met U; the superheroes all looked so simultaneously hopeful and unimpressed that Lex himself couldn’t help comparing his partners with what he imagined Clark would have been like, if Lex had gotten to find that out for himself.

It got so that he could pretend, when he wasn’t being careful, that he really had been bluffing all along, concealing true love beneath a mask of enmity. History, after all, was written by the victors. Even if Lex didn’t feel very much like a victor when he thought about Clark.

All in all, it was only a marginally satisfactory situation.

But it got truly awkward when Clark returned from the dead.

Part II

“Lex Luthor is a liar!” Clark reiterated. “Lex Luthor lies! It even alliterates! Why am I the only one who remembers this?”

Wonder Woman’s face grew even more still, and the Flash stopped vibrating long enough to frown. Possibly Clark shouldn’t have mentioned memory, since the working theory among the otherwise sensible superheroes of the Justice League was apparently that his death and resurrection had somehow given him selective amnesia. (Batman, of course, accepted Clark’s side of the story immediately; so, point for the erratic superhero.) He’d just spent half an hour listening to them theorize that the reason that he was denying his passionate relationship with Lex was that he’d traumatically forgotten. For some reason, this appealed to them more than the idea that _he was actually Lex’s mortal enemy_ , which Clark considered far more Occam’s Razor-like.

“Look,” Clark said, because he’d found that explaining the right thing to do often worked if you did it enough times, and maybe that worked with explaining the truth as well, though admittedly he was less experienced there, “if Lex used my—death—as an opportunity to rehabilitate himself, and if he’s really been doing everything you say, then it’s only because he’s got a longer game in mind. It’s the Big Lie—claim something so outrageous that everyone thinks that it has to be true.” He looked around the table, forcing each of them to meet his eyes in turn (skipping Batman, not just because Batman didn’t need convincing; trying to stare Batman down meant letting the abyss look back into you, and that was not on his agenda today), trying to transfer his bone-deep knowledge of Lex Luthor’s treachery to them by sheer conviction.

“He denied it,” Diana said abruptly.

“What?”

She met his gaze without hesitation. “He first pretended that there had been nothing between you other than hate. I believe he thought you’d prefer to let your secret die with you. At the time, I thought he misjudged you.”

Clark wanted to squirm. He didn’t deserve that look of disappointment, he reminded himself.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, feeling a bit like an ordinary Smallville citizen listening to some of the more ridiculous explanations that had been bandied about for the havoc that meteor freaks had wreaked. “You went to Lex, told him you knew we were lovers, he said it wasn’t true, and you kept going?”

John’s hands were fisted on the table, as they’d been through much of the discussion. “None of us denies that Luthor’s an excellent liar,” he said, and Clark recognized the grudging respect on his face. Of course, John would dislike almost everything about Lex even without Lex’s history of going after the League, but beating back Darkseid would’ve earned Lex a lot of credit with him anyway.

Clark had read the reports, watched the video. He knew what Lex had done. That one battle had gone a long way to balance the scales, at least if Lex would ever acknowledge that he had something for which to atone.

“Okay,” Clark said, needing to regroup. “Let’s accept that Lex has behaved himself in my absence. But let’s also accept that, for whatever reason, _my_ knowledge of Lex is only as my enemy.” He didn’t keep the twinge off his face, because that was and always would be untrue; the friendship had soured—Lex had poisoned it (and if Clark had ever wanted more, then he really needed to let go of that, because it would only trip him up with Lex now)--but denying its existence was a mistake. Clark could tell from the way Batman shifted in his seat that he, at least, had marked the lie. “So, what do we _do_ about it?”

“Uh,” Flash said. “I don’t think _we_ do anything, man. I mean, it’s cool if you’re into that and all, but—”

“What Flash is saying,” J’onn said, as gently as one could interrupt Flash, “is that this is a conversation for you and Lex.”

Clark sighed. He knew how that one went. Recriminations and yelling and a feeling like acid indigestion in his chest. He’d tried to avoid direct contact in the past few years, but J’onn was right: he needed to confront Lex and hear for himself whatever fairytale Lex had concocted about his beneficient goals. “Fine,” he conceded, already imagining how he’d take out the various security measures so that he could catch Lex in his penthouse. “I’ll go back to Metropolis as soon as I’ve finished looking at the reports from the last six months.”

Diana tilted her head, forehead wrinkled as if she was surprised that Clark still hadn’t managed to catch up. “He is here, in the Watchtower,” she said mildly. “He declined to be present when you first began to react to solar radiation, but he does have a workspace next to the control room, and he has been waiting.”

****

Clark stopped outside Lex’s office—office! the world had officially gone topsy-turvy while Clark had been dead—and took a moment to compose himself.

Naturally, the door slid open before he was done.

Lex didn’t say anything, just rose from his seat behind a transparent aluminum desk. There was nothing on the desk but a decanter and a glass, both half-full. He didn’t make any move to close the distance between them.

“So, I guess all it took to make a hero out of you was for me to die,” Clark said. It made a sick kind of sense, actually, the remaining good in Lex only able to be expressed once he wasn’t reacting automatically to the years of enmity between them, Clark the symbol of everything with which he refused to compromise.

Lex breathed out once, all tense shoulders and somehow looking down on Clark despite being several—make that _many_ \--inches shorter. “That appears to be the case.”

“It’s going to be pretty embarrassing for you when you admit the truth.” Clark folded his arms. If Lex was forced to confess with Clark standing right there, then they’d _have_ to believe him. It’d make a nice change of pace from Lex’s countless suave denials and offloading of responsibility on minor flunkies. And with all the ways Lex had let the League into LexCorp’s day-to-day operations, it would be almost impossible for Lex to resume his shenanigans—at least for a couple of years. This colossal mistake had an upside, after all.

Lex quickly downed his drink and poured himself another. “I never claimed to be anything other than what I was. You’ve got no reason to take this out on me. This is your so-called friends’ fault.”

“Batman never believed you!” Clark protested, because he felt that it was important to establish that Lex hadn’t fooled everyone.

Lex somehow managed to roll his eyes without moving a muscle. “Batman is a paranoid control freak who’d spy on the sun to make sure it doesn’t secretly plan to conquer the Earth if he could, and believe me when I say I know whereof I speak. If he’d credibly pretended to trust me, he’d have worried the rest of the League so much they never would have worked with me. I’m actually surprised he didn’t figure that out. More than that, I’m wondering about his endgame. God only knows what he’s planning for you, now that he knows that death has no dominion where you’re concerned.”

Clark shook his head, because Lex wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t Clark’s priority. “What are you planning to do now?”

Lex examined the empty glass in his hand, then refilled it. “Sadly, alcohol poisoning is out of the question, but I’m working on a pretty good buzz. Then I’m going to go back to Metropolis and get laid.”

“ _What_?”

Lex clutched his drink like it was a child’s teddy bear. “Do you even have any idea how hard it is to convince a person with a minimal sense of discretion and self-preservation to have sex when it’s evident you’re being protectively monitored by the Justice League?” His voice rose and his words sped up. Clark stared, kind of fascinated; it was almost like being a kid back in the mansion again, Lex on one of his lecture jags. “Aside from the fact that, let’s face it, getting involved with a metahuman with a seat at the big table is like signing up for active combat duty, that group of judgmental busybodies has scared off anyone I found remotely attractive, and they’d have staged an intervention if I’d tried a professional. Now that you’re back and you can publicly renounce me or whatever it is that you feel the need to do to assuage your sense of outrage, I can at least get back to my preferred form of recreation.”

And yeah, Clark had seen that, too, back in the Smallville days. Lex had never been shy about showing off how he kissed, how he touched, how he put his hands on a person. Girl. Woman. Whatever. Wait a second—“You only like women,” he said, outraged all over again at how his friends had misread the situation.

Lex picked up the decanter, examined it as if considering whether to drink straight from there, then shrugged and topped off his glass. “At this point I’m hard pressed to say that I like _anyone_ , Superman. But, not that it makes any difference to you, that’s not in fact an axis along which I discriminate. And I suppose it would be futile to remind you once more that this isn’t about me, it’s about the delusions of metahumans, which, frankly, gives me little confidence in their ability to make the right decisions to save the world on a routine basis.” Lex wasn’t slurring his words, not exactly, but they were running together with somewhat more dispatch than his usual seductive tones, which had always reminded Clark a little bit of the rough thrill of a cat’s tongue.

Clark shook his head, because his thoughts were going weird places. It was the situation: returning from the dead and finding himself the proud possessor of a grieving lover would have discombobulated anyone, he was sure. Also, Lex had sex with guys? “Then how come you never made a move on me?” he asked, realizing too late that, while he sounded just the right amount of ticked-off for a standard Lex encounter, he was using just the wrong words.

Lex’s mouth dropped open for what seemed like an eternity. Clark briefly wished that the Phantom Zone would explode, or maybe that Granny Goodness would drop in for a little chat.

“Clark,” he said, and then stopped to take a couple of gulps of alcohol. “I gave you a truck, fireworks, concert tickets, a high school football team, and other inducements too varied to list. I did everything short of stick my hand down your pants, and don’t think it wasn’t a close thing.”

Now it was Clark’s turn to gape. Lex had—but Clark had been—and why hadn’t he _said_ —no, Clark knew the dozen reasons for that, but still—

He took a step forward at last, and Lex twitched around the eyes. Then Clark shoved the desk out of his way—he heard it embed into the wall—and Lex really flinched that time.

“Then why don’t you try it now?”

Lex’s gaze dropped below Clark’s waist, and Clark would have bet the Fortress that was involuntary.

“What makes you think I still want to?” Lex said at last. Clark wasn’t going to mention that his voice was shaking.

“Because you never stop feeling anything, Lex,” he said, and he really hoped he didn’t sound condescending. “You just make it more complicated.”

Lex’s throat worked. Clark watched, fascinated, as Lex flushed all the way up his head.

“Does that clown costume even come off?” Lex asked.

Clark allowed him the jab. He was pretty scared too. “You’re the genius. Come find out.”

Much, much later, Lex sat upright with a jolt, waking Clark. “God _damnit_ ,” he said, sounding outraged enough that Clark reflexively looked around for Kryptonite, and guns.

“What?” Clark considered rubbing his hand down Lex’s spine, then did it. Lex twisted away for a second, then harrumphed and settled back into the caress.

“Your idiot friends were _right_ ,” Lex complained.

“Wow,” Clark said, “I’m devastated by that. I should really give them a stern lecture.”

Lex sneered, but in a reasonably good-natured way.

“While you’re up,” Clark suggested, his hands moving to more interesting places.

“Fine,” Lex said, long-suffering and totally adorable, and by his disgruntled expression, he knew it. “But first, a bed. This cape might be invulnerable, but it’s far from soft.”

Clark bit his lip and nodded, mostly because he knew that would only aggravate Lex further.

Sure enough: “Shut up,” Lex snarled.

So, on the whole, there was something to be said for coming back to life only to find himself involved in a passionate affair with his arch-enemy.


	2. Chapter 2

“You and Kal-El have reconciled,” Diana said, and Lex’s hand automatically went to his throat, even though the skin was already smooth, the bruise healed. How the Hell did she know? If she hadn’t been watching Batman’s inevitable security footage, then most likely the air filters hadn’t succeeded in removing the smell from the air of his office, which was just humiliating.

Who was he trying to kid? There was no way out of this titanic embarrassment but to face it down, just like he had all the times Superman had dragged him to jail or Lionel had tormented him in public.

Lex tried to turn casually, but he was aware that he was not completely successful. At least the Amazon was unlikely to judge him. He swallowed. Diana’s expression was pleasant and only slightly superior (which was fair, since she _was_ ). “Can I help you with something?”

Diana tilted her head. “I would know how Kal-El fares, from one who knew him well before his resurrection.”

“ _You_ knew him well,” Lex snapped before he could think better of it. Wonder Woman certainly had spent more time with Superman in the past few years than Lex had, even counting all the times when lawyers had been present. “What, are you worried he didn’t come back right?”

Unfortunately, she nodded. “Returns from the underworld are dangerous, Luthor. Even one who is pure of heart may bring … passengers. New-risen, he may be in great peril, and we must be wary.”

Lex was out of disbelief for this lifetime, so he only nodded. “I’ll bear that in mind. But, in all honesty, he seems just the same to me.” Except for the part where we fucked, he added mentally.

Well, damn. Diana’s explanation for Clark’s otherwise inexplicable behavior made a lot more sense than ‘he’s wanted me all along but never knew how to say it,’ no matter how much Lex would have liked to believe the latter.

“Out of curiosity,” Lex said, as Diana was turning to leave, “just how would you treat the presence of a … passenger?”

She paused, one hand on the door handle. “Ordinarily, there would be a purification ritual, bringing the one affected back to death’s threshold. Evil spirits could be returned to their planes, if the peril were great enough. But for Kal-El—”

Lex nodded. Getting an ordinary human to the point of death was tricky enough. There was no telling what it would take to put Superman in that position. Lex himself knew how to make Clark hurt with Kryptonite, and he had some testable theories about how to kill him, but to calibrate precisely enough to cause a near-death experience would be extremely difficult. “Well, it’s good that you have nothing to worry about, then,” he said.

Her lips twitched, but she didn’t call him on it, and then she’d closed the door and he was alone again.

Life, Lex reflected, was a giant conspiracy against him. He was Charlie Brown, bald head and all, and the cosmos arranged itself in the shape of Lucy to snatch the football of triumph away every time he got close.

Or perhaps a better metaphor: life was a box of chocolates, except that on inspection what Lex had received was carob. Even if it had seemed like chocolate when he had initially, blissfully, tasted it.

****

“I can’t believe I actually slept with you,” Clark said bitterly, straining against the Kryptonite manacles. Lex was fairly impressed that he was even conscious (though that was another piece of evidence for the ‘demonic passenger’ theory, since Clark on his own should have been passed out for at least two minutes). “I should have known.”

“Probably,” Lex agreed, checking the priceless antique volume at the side of the room to make sure he had the Aeolic down properly; it wasn’t a dialect in which he was fluent.

“If you’re using me to raise some unholy evil—” Clark warned, and Lex turned an annoyed eye on him.

“First of all, it was the Joker who wanted to make a pact with He Who Must Not Be Named. I want to rule the world, not dissolve it into unspeakable brain-melting horror. Second, if you had paid a _minute_ of attention to our conversations back in Smallville, or for that matter to Diana’s extensive lecture series—it’s available on iTunes, you should really check it out—you’d recognize the Greek symbols surrounding you.”

Clark had stopped struggling.

“Then what is this?” he asked, almost as if he were listening.

Lex sighed. “It’s a ritual to rid you of the dark passenger you apparently acquired as part of your return from the underworld.”

“Return from the underworld?” Clark repeated, his green-tinged skin making his incredulity even more exaggerated. “L—Lex, I was in a paradeath state!”

“Don’t use words you don’t understand, it’s undignified,” Lex said absently, cursing the idiots at STAR Labs who’d given Clark delusions of scientific competence. “It’s possible you’re not even aware of what’s happening. But answer me this: Since you’ve been reanimated—”

“Still not a zombie—” Clark muttered, though frankly the Kryptonite glow wasn’t doing him any favors in that regard.

“—you’ve been behaving in extremely out-of-character ways. Why is that?”

Clark lifted his head as far off of the slab as he could and then banged it down a couple of times, eyes screwed shut in frustration. Because of his weakened state, the slab didn’t shatter. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, you know. If you’ve gone delusional, even I won’t be able to keep you out of Arkham—”

Lex held up fingers, to help Clark keep track. “You declined to assist with the earthquake in Hong Kong.”

“The government requested I stay away and their own superheroes had it under control! You know I don’t violate political boundaries unless there’s a real need!”

“You refused to give Lois Lane an interview.”

“That’s because she told me outright that the topic would be my apparently not-so-secret affair with billionaire Lex Luthor, which by the way is looking more and more like an ex-affair with every passing minute!”

Lex ignored the commentary, because he’d known from the minute Clark had touched him that they were on a timer.

“You refused to attend the Christmas party at the children’s ward at Metropolis General.”

“The Flash likes to go and so we swapped duty shifts. Lex,” Clark sighed, “this evidence is so bad it wouldn’t convince a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist. Can we agree that what you’re really worried about is that I wouldn’t sleep with you if I were in my right mind?”

Lex paused in his candle-lighting. Put like that, it sounded a little self-undermining. “That in itself remains powerful evidence that something is amiss,” he pointed out.

“Guy who woke up in chains agrees.” Clark clanked them for emphasis. “On the other hand, you’ve been fighting on the side of good for upwards of a year, my friends practically locked us in a closet together, I’ve always kind of wondered what you’d be like, and—in a turn of events that will surprise no one who’s watched you walk across a room—you’re spectacular.” Lex noted, clinically, that a bright blush under Kryptonite poison was more of an apple-green. “Isn’t there some way you can test me _without_ doing whatever painful and horrible thing you clearly have planned?”

The devil can cite scripture, but it wasn’t a ridiculous suggestion, so Lex gave it some thought. He flipped through the book of mysteries, translating on the fly, and indeed there was a spell of revelation written in the same hand as the ritual of banishment.

Clark didn’t react at all to the spell. His eyes should have flashed or his body should have arched up in pain, and even though the Kryptonite might have damped down some of that, the absence of reaction was worrisome.

It was empirical proof, to the extent that magic could be deemed empirical proof. Lex shook with indecision. He couldn’t guarantee Clark’s safety if he continued the cleansing ritual. But if he let a monster loose on humanity wearing Clark’s face, taking advantage of the trust they all had for Clark—

“Lex,” Clark said. His voice was fading already. Soon the choice might be taken away from Lex.

“You never talked to me like this before,” Lex said, still suspicious.

“Um, we were enemies through most of my twenties and a significant portion of my emotional and social development?” Clark managed.

Lex silently apologized to the teeming millions he was possibly condemning to horrible death, and went to blow the miniature charges that would release the Kryptonite manacles.

Minutes later, Clark shuddered as the last of the Kryptonite went back in its lead case. Lex, after a moment’s hesitation, offered him a hand off of the slab. Clark took it, ending up face to face with Lex. At which point, he vomited all over Lex.

“You deserved that,” he said while he was still wiping his mouth.

“The tie didn’t,” Lex pointed out, stripping until he was bare to the waist. Clark had mostly missed the pants, and the shoes could be cleaned.

Just then, the Flash burst into Lex’s supposedly secret chamber—God _damn_ it!—and stopped in his tracks as he stared at the slab with its broken chains, Clark looming over Lex, and Lex’s half-dressed state. Lex _deeply_ hoped that he hadn’t noticed the vomit, because the last thing Lex needed was a reputation as an emetophile.

“Right!” the Flash said brightly. “We’re gonna need you both at HQ, now-ish. I’ll just … wait outside.”

Clark and Lex regarded each other with dismay. “This isn’t over,” Clark warned, and for some reason it sounded different than all the other times he’d heard variations of that from Superman.

Lex swallowed and nodded.

“For one thing,” Clark added before Lex could escape to get himself clean, “next time I think we ought to see how _you_ like being chained up.”


End file.
